5 comments:

Fabulous covers Scoop! I have some of Curtis's Deadly Hands of King Fu, which is of a very similar artistic style to the first cover, probably the same artist maybe. The Iwo Jima style pose of cover 2 reminds me of Blazing Combat, a war comic from Warren who published Creepy and Eerie. the Booster Rocket type assembly on cover 3 is just fab. The stories look great and include tar Bradbury and Mike Moorcock no less! Superb Scoop, more covers please!

I seem to recall there were a few of these types of publications in the mid seventies over in the UK. I remember those Kung-Fu magazines you mention, presumably part of the Bruce Lee craze. These are another of those type of mags that had a bit of a low budget fanzine feel about them, like Dez Skinns, House of Hammer, helping the impression that the editors were just fans like we were.

I loved this comic. Absolutely loved it. It combined adaptations of classic SF short stories and novels with original stories. One clarification: although you'll see names like "Curtis" and "Magazine Management" the fact is, this was 100 percent a Marvel Comics publication. By the time these books appeared, those imprints had become subsidiaries of Marvel rather than the other way around. The same goes for other series published by Marvel in a slick magazine format -- black and white interior art, glossy painted color covers, sized to fit on the regular magazine rack instead of the comics rack -- such as Deadly Hands of Kung Fu or Vampire Tales.

A few years back, one of the great pleasures of my adult life was getting to tell the writer of my favorite story from this series I had just reread that particular issue and discovered his story stood up very well indeed after all these years. He was not unhappy at a compliment on his work after a quarter of a century. :-)